Radio chaos

The night Mikey Adams took over the country’s highest-rated sports talk radio station he felt he had no choice.

Forget the past, the Emmys, the $150,000-a-year gig at New England Cable News, and the outlandish style that made him one of Boston’s most popular sports guys. Adams was selling cars at Waltham Ford. His career consisted of talk show fill-in work for WEEI-AM (850). Then the night slot opened up. Perfect. Except that WEEI program director Jason Wolfe brought in a bunch of other guys to try out. Weeks passed, with Adams slogging away as a substitute.

‘‘I’m fed up with this crap,’’ Adams said on that December night last year from behind the broadcast microphone. ‘‘I’m staying here until I get an answer.’’

He announced that he had pushed a 6-foot tall bookcase against the studio door as a barricade. He laughed after lighting yet another cigarette. Others were not so amused.

‘‘Mike, as a friend, can I tell you, this is not smart,’’ said afternoon host Glenn Ordway, locked out and communicating through a producer’s microphone.

Pete Sheppard, the boorish update guy, barked at Adams from the other side of the studio glass.

‘‘I hope a truck hits you on the way out,’’ Sheppard said, and stormed out of WEEI.

Adams pleaded his case, on air. He had a new wife, and they were expecting their first child. He had a job offer in Cleveland, but he ‘‘didn’t want to go to that rat hole.’’ He needed an answer, and he wasn’t leaving until he got one.

Around 9:30 p.m., Wolfe called in and delivered the news: At 51, Mikey Adams would get his chance.

‘I had a guy from Florida say, ‘Was that real?’.’’ Adams says. ‘‘I said, ‘Did it sound real?’.’’

He shrugs and takes a sip of white wine.

‘‘How much of any of this is real?’’ he says.

It’s just past midnight and Adams is sitting on a barstool at the Halfway Café in Watertown. He started coming here a few years ago when his first marriage and career dissolved, spending $11,000 on beer over the course of one year. He also met his second wife, Christine, or Chrissy, at the Halfway. She’s 34, has a creative writing degree and a dozen tattoos. She also just had his baby, Andrew Samuel Adams.

First thing, the hijacking was a publicity stunt, Wolfe and Adams admit. Men with bookcases don’t take over radio stations. But the performance, a mix of desperation, humor, and rebellion, was a stunt only Adams could pull off, said his former boss, NECN station manager Charles Kravetz, who was listening.

On WEEI, Adams, whose show runs weeknights from 7 to midnight, sticks out. He doesn’t shout or talk politics like the morning guys, John Dennis and Gerry Callahan, or jockey for airtime like the afternoon barroom gang that is ‘‘The Big Show.’’

‘‘Planet Mikey’’ is as quirky and corny as its theme song, a self-referential adaptation of the ‘‘It’s Garry Shandling’s Show’’ theme. The host knows sports and can tick off statistics with ease. But he’s just as likely to quote a Kris Kristofferson lyric, do his impression of former Sox pitcher Luis Tiant, or croon the title of ‘‘Hawaii Five-O’’ loudly as the instrumental blares over the airwaves to prove his point. See, the song has words.

Unlike his predecessor, Ted Sarandis, the dryly serious devotee of college basketball and retractable stadium roofs, Adams lets his mind wander. (He has diagnosed himself with Attention Deficit Disorder.) When a caller tries to suck him into a gripe session about the signing of Celtics forward Brian Scalabrine, Adams, standing and dancing either like a weary boxer or a hyperactive child, shakes his head.

‘‘Jim, relax,’’ he tells the caller. ‘‘Have a tuna sandwich, a cream soda, and fuhgeddaboudit.’’

He started in the 1970s as Dale Denver, paid $5 an hour to spin records on Hartford’s WPOP-AM Top 40. Over the next decade, Adams rose through the ranks of local radio and scored a TV gig in 1985 as sports reporter, and later an anchor, on Hartford’s WFSB. In 1992, NECN hired Adams to host an hourlong nightly sports show.

‘‘Mike Adams Sportsworld,’’ which ran for six years, blended the low-tech style of cable access with the sensibility of David Letterman. Adams and his guests played ‘‘Hide the Salami’’ and ‘‘Name the Goon.’’ For a segment called ‘‘Celebrity Feet,’’ Adams ventured into the locker room to videotape — what else — celebrity feet, and asked viewers to link the name with the naked toes.

‘‘I think Mike is brilliant,’’ says Kravetz, the NECN station manager. ‘‘He is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, and he’s got an extraordinary charisma on television. He’s the most relaxed and comfortable person in front of the camera that I’ve ever met.’’

But even then, Adams could be the network’s most frustrating employee. Exhausted from a daily three-hour commute from Connecticut, where he and his wife were bringing up their children, he would do his show off the cuff. He also had a bizarre incident in 1994, when he was arrested for possession of marijuana while cleaning his car — at 2 a.m. — at a Mr. Sparkle car wash in Vernon, Conn. He received a six-month probation.

‘‘I told Mike, for years, ‘If you had even a modicum of discipline you could be a national figure,’.’’ remembers Kravetz. ‘‘If you’ve read anything about Letterman, you know he’s obsessive; everything is planned. Mike would walk in front of the camera at one minute to 11 and kind of wing it for an hour. A lot of it was absolutely hilarious, some sophomoric, but at the end of the day, it lacked the kind of structure that would take him to the next level.’’

The spiral began in 1998. That’s when Adams told Kravetz he was quitting NECN.

On his last show, Adams, swigging from a bottle of champagne and surrounded by many of his favorites, including flamboyant former Red Sox pitcher Bill ‘‘Spaceman’’ Lee, took calls from well-wishers.

‘‘Where you going?’’ asked ESPN’s Bill Pidto, a former co-worker.

For once, Adams had no answer.

Looking back, he can’t really explain why he left. His long commute, he says, had contributed to a growing addiction to cocaine. His marriage of 25 years was dissolving.

He took a job in New York City playing sidekick to Leslie Gold, former cohost of WRKO’s ‘‘Two Chicks Dishing.’’ It was a disaster. Gold says Adams was perpetually late.

‘‘He told me his alarm clock was busted,’’ she said. ‘‘Then he told me his dog ran away.’’

In February of 2000, Adams hit bottom. A friend ratted out his drug problem to his family, leading to an intervention. Surrounded by his parents, sister, brothers, and two college-age children, Adams listened to an ultimatum. He needed to get treatment. Adams was moved, but he also couldn’t resist the humor in the situation. He looked over at a consultant the family had hired to run the intervention. He decided, right then, to name the stranger Dr. Death.

‘‘It was very emotional and very heavy,’’ Adams says. ‘‘These are my children who I thought should never even know I did any drugs. So I said, ‘That’s it, I’m done with it.’ And this guy, suddenly he goes, ‘Mike, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to come with me and we’re going to go to this place.’ I said, ‘No, no, you’re Dr. Death and I’m not going anywhere with you.’’

Adams is standing now, doing his talk radio dance. ‘‘Tell me you’re not a Yankees fan,’’ he barks into the mike.

He looks older than the rising star who took over NECN. He’s heavier, and his once bushy mustache, which added a slapstick twinkle to his mischievous gaze, has been replaced by a more generic, sports-guy goatee. He no longer does drugs, though he drinks. On air, he says, he feels like the same old Mikey.

On this night, Adams talks baseball, his favorite sport. Barry Bonds is a ‘‘miserable puke of a human being,’’ he tells one caller. Johnny Damon, the former Red Sox outfielder who signed with the Yankees, ‘‘a traitor and Judas and an overpaid, weak-armed sellout.’’

Every break, Adams scrambles into the elevator and down three flights to squeeze in another Merit Ultra Light, a cigarette so effeminate, he says, it ‘‘should have breasts.’’

Back in the studio, he takes a call from a woman who knows he loves palindromes. ‘‘Rats live on no evil star,’’ Adams tells her and laughs. ‘‘Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron.’’

Off the air, Adams admits this job is perfect. WEEI offers stability. That’s what Adams, a man who had more than a dozen jobs in the same number of years, is looking for.

A few months ago, he and Chrissy rented a house just past Worcester. It’s new construction, with high ceilings, in-ground sprinklers. Andrew was born in March.

He has his Emmys from NECN on the mantel. A baseball glove inscribed to his new son on a bookshelf.

‘‘Selling cars, that’s work,’’ Adams says. ‘‘What I do isn’t like working. I show up. I do it. And some nights I’m tired. But it’s not really like working. This is more, ‘I’m getting paid to do this?’.’’

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.